The Biden administration appears set to end a rapid DNA testing program at the U.S. border that has helped detect fraudulent “families” and protect against child trafficking since 2019, paving the way for children to be brought to the United States to be used as golden tickets into the country by “parents” who might not be related to them at all.
According to a memo U.S. Customs and Border Protection reportedly issued to border agents on May 19 which was obtained by Just The News, the agency is terminating its contract with a third-party company called BODE Technologies to provide rapid DNA testing for migrant families who border agents suspect to be fraudulent.
"The U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) familial DNA contract with BODE Technologies will end on May 31, 2023 and all familial DNA testing will conclude on that date," the memo reads.
The agency noted that “families DNA collection and testing is separate from FBI booking DNA collection," which is a different type of DNA collection used by border agents since 2020. Those samples are sent to an FBI database and screened for known violent criminals.
Despite being blasted by left-wing illegal immigration proponents as targeting innocent asylum-seekers, rapid DNA testing has helped identify countless numbers of children being trafficked across the border by criminals and traffickers claiming to be their families. In April of 2021, border agents encountered an eight-year-old girl who had illegally entered the United States with a 36-year-old man who claimed to be the child’s father. DNA testing proved that wasn’t true, and the man later admitted to being a “friend” of the little girl’s mother, who was still in Brazil.
In 2019, a Honduran woman named Belkin Idania Martinez-Parada agreed to a trafficking scheme to rent three of her four children - ages six months, 6, and 8 - to three different Honduran men so they could pass through the Texas border as families, according to the Center for Immigration Studies. That fiscal year alone, the first that the agency employed wide scale DNA testing of families, CBP identified more than 6,200 fraudulent family members trying to enter the country illegally.
In fact, one Inspector General report found that between 2019 and 2021, nearly 1 in 10 families tested with the rapid DNA method proved not to be related at all.
But despite the clear success of the program to protect children being trafficked by criminals and potential predators, the Biden administration had already started winding down the program beginning in 2021, using rapid DNA testing far less frequently than the Trump administration. According to the Washington Examiner, of the 52,000 migrants who came across the border as family groups in March of 2021, only a few dozen were given DNA tests.